Impeccably acted and playing out what seems to be a collective cultural fascination with the pre-Flower Power '60s (not quite Ward and June, not quite Jimi and Janis), Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road and John Patrick Shanley's Doubt help 2008 meet its quota of prestige-y actor's studio pieces. Both are based on well-regarded (renowned, in the case of the first) literary sources, both sport high-octane casts in the pursuit of that delicate balance in adaptations between literal and spiritual faithfulness, and both, ultimately, have considerably less to say than the surrounding hullabaloo would suggest. Revolutionary Road plots another point on the graph of Mendes' steeply-declining returns--he's a stage director whose greatest weakness is his desire for little epiphanies that play like Everest off the boards, and he's guilty of too much intoxication with the medium besides. Mendes spends so much time fiddling around with his camera to a noodling Thomas Newman score that you feel like giving him some privacy.

Nowhere is that propensity more troubling than in a scene of a botched abortion that plays exactly like the death of Tom Hanks in Mendes' Road to Perdition, thus demonstrating his artistic limitations at the same time that it demonstrates his complete incomprehension of the experience of miscarriage for a woman. The general misogyny of American Beauty comes into focus in this way as something troubling outside the text as well as within. (Auteurism: double-edged.) Meanwhile, Doubt finds another theatre man, Shanley, adapting his own Pulitzer-winning play for the big screen without a clear appreciation of the effect that Dutch angles have on a scene, marking it as a pretty well-written acting exercise that has the misfortune of, more often than not, looking as seasick as Battlefield Earth. It's poorly directed enough, in fact, that the comparison that swims to mind is HBO's John Adams mini-series, which likewise boasts of some exceptional performances guided by amateurish-at-best direction that trivializes--and count Mendes guilty of this, too--some wonderful moments provided by actors strapped to unfortunate bedmates by their unfortunate desire for the proverbial big brass ring.

In his revered 1961 novel, Richard Yates identifies his married antagonists Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) as seduced by the '50s' "lust for conformity." He's the lowest tier of middle-managers in corporate America and she's a fallen starlet; together they decide to pull up their roots and move to Paris on a whim. A pity that April comes up pregnant--a greater pity that devotion to Yates' brilliant, heartbreaking novel means the articulation over eggs and juice of significant chunks of his interior monologues. Winslet and DiCaprio are of course capable of carrying gravid silences just fine--the frustrating irony of movies that spend their budgets on their casts is that the expenditure is often so great as to preclude trusting those casts to do what they've been asked to do.

Chewing over admittedly rich dialogue about the choice between living authentic lives in relative bohemian poverty and inauthentic ones in suburban comfort, Mendes betrays in his objectivism this inability to truly understand what it is to choose home and children over house and material. Revolutionary Road is an ironic object: bathed in the glow of its borrowed prestige, it's a Movie with Movie Stars--stars, as it happens, of the top-grossing movie of all-time--that only comes alive when the deeply troubled son (the great Michael Shannon) of Frank and April's real estate agent (another Titanic alum, Kathy Bates) offers a glimpse at what real regret looks like in this setting instead of the mantle-loading kind. Shannon shines because he's amazing, but also because he's not saddled with the burden of being an icon--of having to issue from perfect lips late-film histrionics that absolutely do not ring true in the picture's suffocating surreality. The movie had me at moments, making the many occasions that it loses me all the more painful.

Better--if only by degrees--is Shanley's directorial follow-up to his affectionately sprung Joe Versus the Volcano. Doubt pits heavyweights Meryl Streep, as stentorian Sister Aloysius Beauvier, against Philip Seymour Hoffman, as reformer priest Father Brendan Flynn; it seems that in the early-1960s of the film, Father Flynn has taken an interest in altar boy Donald (Joseph Foster) that young Sister James (Amy Adams) finds, shall we say, uncomfortable. She reports her misgivings to Sister Aloysius and Sister Aloysius, accordingly, begins a sort of "Sleuth"-ian cat-and-mouse with our Father Flynn over whatever it is we think or don't think. Set as it is about forty years before the Church 'fessed-up and started paying restitution for the many young men and women molested by their "celibate" shepherds, the gigantic elephant in the room is that Sister Aloysius, for as monstrous as she is and for as clearly as she's established as the force fighting progressive Flynn's campaign for a kinder, gentler Church, is probably absolutely right in general, if not in particular. Doubt is, shall we say, less a mystery about what happened in the vestibule between Flynn and Donald than it is a debate already won about whether or not the Catholic tradition resulted in the ritual abuse of generations of children. Too strong? The struggle of Doubt appears to be whether it's the intolerance represented by the good Sister (of race (Donald's black), or of homosexuality (Donald's gay)) that breeds serpents of the mind or freedom from intolerance as represented by the good Father. There's no good answer, clearly, but not even much in the way of fruitful discussion is offered up in what amounts to a whodunit in a minor key, ending in Beauvier's tearful confession that in a chaotic world, the only justice is chance. The Dark Knight did it the same with more faith.

This takes nothing away from Streep's best turn in years and Hoffman in one of two arguments (the other being his Caden Cotard of Synecdoche, New York) that the Oscar he won for Capote was an investment in future projects. Adams holds her own and Viola Davis, someone I've been interested in since her small role in Steven Soderbergh's Solaris, hits it out of the park as Donald's mother in the film's most troubling, most ambiguous, most obnoxious scene as she argues against her son's rescue in favour of the greater good his continued (possible) abuse might offer against the stark cruelties of the ugly world outside. Here, in Doubt, is the one opportunity for the broad discussion it desires about race, and religion, and progress versus stasis, and while it's unfair to say that it's wasted, safe to say that it's not deeply examined. Compare the conversations Flynn has with Sister Aloysius to the twenty-minute pas de deux in no-not-that Steve McQueen's astonishing Hunger for a better illustration of the difference between great acting and getting punched in the gut.

Moral relativism is a philosophical dead end, almost as much as Revolutionary Road's Ayn Rand-ian objectivism; you outgrow these arguments--you only hope that the entertainments intended to illuminate as you get more curious and, consequently, more tired, have the decency to mature at the same pace. The fact that the conversations these films are destined to inspire will inevitably be limited to the strength of their performances says a great deal about their relative importance when all's said and done. The fact that the issues that Revolutionary Road and Doubt raise should, when done properly, leave you speechless and shaken instead of basking in the righteous glow of understanding a banality writ irreducible and large says everything there needs to be said about the progress of the mainstream, end-of-year curriculum.-Walter Chaw

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Published: January 2, 2009